Top 13 takeaways from the CLC Members’ Meeting

Ryan from Nancarrow Partnerships attended a recent CLC Members’ Meeting to see what it’s all about. Here he shares his top takeaways from the day.

The CLC’s Members’ Meeting, a jam-packed day with lots of useful information and loads of opportunities for networking. If you’re a member, and have not yet been to one, you are missing out!

Here are my main takeaways from the September 2016 Meeting.

Rokas Bucianas – Restless Development – a youth-led development agency which recently implemented its global eLearning platform:

Takeaway 1

“The most creative ideas come from not enough time and not enough money”

For example, rather than shifting junior staff to unimportant tasks, they were given important roles in the heart of the eLearning launch, leading to a more engaged workforce and a more successful platform launch.

Takeaway 2

The power of fun in learning is not to be underestimated – Restless Development effectively employed small ‘missions’ in their eLearning, which encouraged the learners to be more involved and engaged to the learning process. These missions were as simple as successfully logging into the platform, or completing the first course.

Takeaway 3

Brand is King:

“To encourage engagement, we had to give an identity to our eLearning”

In fact, their eLearning platform looks exactly like an extension of their website, and the use of real-life photographs rather than stock images, enhances the ‘sense of belonging’ to their global eLearning platform. Their Maarifa Platform is proof of this approach (they even dropped ‘eLearning’ from the keyword!).

Laura Overton – Towards Maturity – Workshop about defining Learning Culture, what it means, and how to make Learning work with the culture of your organisation:

Takeaway 4

A culture is nothing more than the intrinsic beliefs and values of the people in the organisation. Successful learning should not involve changing learner attitude, but should adapt to the culture of the organisation. Put more simply, the training has to relate to the staff in order for the training to be successful.

Takeaway 5

Successful organisations are not trying to change the culture of the organisation – they are trying to identify things that already exist, and employing a marketing approach to show staff that the learning opportunities in their organisation exists.

Takeaway 6

The second half of the workshop focused on the importance of line managers in employing learning into an organisation. Laura and the attendees discussed a lot of ways on how line managers can be encouraged to build a learning culture.

Issy Nancarrow – Campaign Learning – Workshop about understanding and applying marketing techniques to your learning interventions:

Takeaway 7

Understand the contact points of your learning intervention (the points where your staff get in contact with your learning efforts). Then enhance these, in order to keep communication going. The attendees listed these points of contact in their organisations, and discussed ways on how these can be utilised.

Takeaway 8

Learning providers usually lose sleep over three things: engagement levels, learner behaviour changes, and ways of proving the value/impact of L&D. Marketing techniques already provide solutions to all these issues! Solution: Apply the FLAG model to your learning interventions.

Takeaway 9

Understand people’s needs first. For a learning intervention to be successful these needs have to be taken into account. This drew a parallel with Laura’s talk earlier; for learning to be effective, staff have to relate to the experience being provided. It has been proven that even simply branding your eLearning platform increases engagement levels over an unbranded, generic platform.

Lightning Talks – quick 8 minute sessions from different speakers:

Takeaway 10

Paul Jenner from OMBEA introduced the innovative voting pads that were present on our tables, and outlined their functions as a reliable way of gathering feedback or for live-voting. Members in the session also had time to test out these pads. CLC announced that should members want to make use of these pads, they are to contact CLC and they can be sent out to them (CLC have 50 voting pads along with 200 licences available – contact CLC for more information)

Takeaway 11

Gill Chester from Little Man Project introduced an effective Induction Template, which CLC members can obtain through the consortium. This template can be used as a first step in the induction of staff.

Takeaway 12

The long-awaited launch of the GivebackUK platform was next. Martin Baker introduced the platform and its functions, along with goals for its implementation in the coming months. Members also have extra functionality in this free platform, such scheduling videos to groups, and more.

Takeaway 13

RoadMap, the new learning platform from CLC, was introduced by Josh Willcock. If you would like to know more, please contact us on 08451 707 702.